Ground Is Broken on the Holland Tunnel

On October 12, 1920, crews broke ground on a ventilation shaft at Canal and Washington Streets in Lower Manhattan, the official start of construction on what was then called the Hudson River Vehicular Tunnel. Chief engineer Clifford Holland had already spent a year wrestling with the hardest part of the problem: how to let drivers breathe under a river without the tunnel filling with carbon monoxide. Working with engineer Ole Singstad, Holland tested fan systems in a coal mine in Pennsylvania before settling on a design powerful enough to swap out the entire volume of air in the tunnel every 90 seconds. Holland never saw it finished. He died of a heart attack in 1924, two days before the crews digging from New York and New Jersey were set to meet under the river, and the tunnel took his name instead of the Hudson's when it finally opened in 1927.